Abstract

Textor’s The Disappearance of the Soul and the Turn Against Metaphysics examines the voluntarist background of Schlick’s epistemology, including his conception of knowledge as essentially involving judgements that relate at least two terms, and his connected objection against according intuition epistemic status. Textor interprets Schlick’s conception of intuition in light of Schopenhauer’s distinction between ordinary and extra-ordinary cognition. Thus Textor argues that Schlick takes intuition to be a form of ‘steady contemplation’ (Disappearance, 348) of an object that is ‘either a universal or a particular’ (332). I suggest an alternative interpretation, according to which Schlick takes intuition to be an immersion into the contents of the stream of consciousness, which he claims to be a formless ‘Heraclitian flux’ (General Theory, 31, 156). This interpretation allows for a defence, against Textor’s objections, of Schlick’s thesis that the aim of knowledge is prediction. If the kind of flux given in pure intuition is genuinely ‘Heraclitian’ – that is to say, if the stream of consciousness is ever-changing and unrepeatable – then it is simply impossible for ‘the devotee of intuition’ (150) to predict its course. By contrast, the process of re-cognition that constitutes knowledge is intimately tied to prediction.